Wednesday, February 20, 2008

You Laugh at the Crude American Stereotypes, We'll Do the Tasteless Beer

There was a time when I had no problem with Budweiser. As far as inexpensive macrobrews go, their stuff is generally better than their competitors. But Budweiser and I became sworn enemies about two years ago, when I saw a series of advertisements they did in England during the World Cup under the slogan "You do the football, we'll do the beer" (just to be clear, they are talking about English football, ie soccer).

Basically, these commercials played to the semi-common stereotype in Europe that Americans are stupid and don't understand anything that's not American. In one commercial a group of Americans were trying to play soccer, but the players would do things like pick up the ball and run with it and tackle each other. So the premise was an American team acts like idiots and then the "You do the football, we'll do the beer" slogan would appear. Never mind that the American team was good enough to make it to the World Cup. In another series of advertisements, two American sportscasters act stupid and say things like "We're coming to you from a little town called Germany". Get it? Americans don't know enough geography to figure out that Germany is a country. It infuriated me that Budweiser would play to these real and unfair stereotypes to make some money. I was especially sensitive to it living in England at the time and occasionally coming across these stereotypes.

You can read an article about it in the Guardian here. They also provide a link so you can see a shortened version of one of the commercials. You can't find a full commercial on the internet as far as I can tell because I'm sure Budweiser doesn't want its American base to find out about it.